The U.S. and Israel launched a major attack on Iran on Saturday, with President Donald Trump calling on the Iranian public to “seize control of your destiny” and rise up against the Islamic leadership that has ruled the nation since 1979. On January 3rd of this year, a similar strike in Venezuela resulted in the ouster of President Nicolas Maduro. University of Alabama student Josie Malave is going for her Masters degree in Journalism. She said she still has family and friends in that South American nation.
“I woke up to the news,” Malave. “I didn't know anything about it until I had woken up and my phone was blowing up off the charts. My family chat, you know, my family group message was going crazy. I had a lot of social media posts sent to me.”
Malave’s father is Venezuelan and came to the United States when he was in his twenties. Her mother is from Kentucky. Questions still swirl around whether President Trump’s actions to attack Venezuela, capture that nation’s leader, and transport him to the United States for trial are legal. Malave said the average Venezuelan doesn’t care so long as Maduro is gone.
“We were more so on the side of, if it wasn't done, it would be more unethical to watch everyone continue to suffer in Venezuela the way they have been now,” Malave observed.
Regarding the overnight U.S. military strikes in Iran, some of the first targets appeared to be around the offices of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and Iranian media reported strikes nationwide. Smoke could be seen rising from the capital. It wasn’t immediately clear whether the 86-year-old leader was in his offices at the time of the strike.
“When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations,” Trump said in a video announcing “major combat operations” were underway. “For many years, you have asked for America’s help, but you never got it.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu echoed that sweeping goal. “Our joint operation will create the conditions for the brave Iranian people to take their fate into their own hands,” Netanyahu said.
The strikes opened a stunning new chapter in U.S. intervention in Iran and marked the second time in eight months that the Trump administration has used military force against the Islamic Republic. They also came just weeks after Trump ordered a military operation to capture Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and bring him and his wife to New York to face federal drug conspiracy charges.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio defending the Trump administration’s military operation to capture Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro this week telling Caribbean leaders, many of whom objected to that move, that the country and the region were better off as a result.
Speaking to leaders from the 15-member Caribbean Community bloc at a summit in the country of St. Kitts and Nevis, Rubio brushed aside concerns about the legality of Maduro’s capture last month that have been raised among Venezuela’s island-state neighbors and others.
“Irrespective of how some of you may have individually felt about our operations and our policy toward Venezuela, I will tell you this, and I will tell you this without any apology or without any apprehension: Venezuela is better off today than it was eight weeks ago,” Rubio told the leaders in a closed-door meeting, according to a transcript of his remarks later distributed by the U.S. State Department.
Rubio said that since Maduro’s ouster and the effective takeover of Venezuela’s oil sector by the United States, the interim authorities in the South American country have made “substantial” progress in improving conditions by doing “things that eight or nine weeks ago would have been unimaginable.”
The Caribbean leaders have gathered to debate pressing issues in a region that President Donald Trump has targeted for a 21st-century incarnation of the Monroe Doctrine meant to ensure Washington’s dominance in the Western Hemisphere. The Republican administration has declared a focus closer to home even as Washington increasingly has been preoccupied by the possibility of a U.S. military attack on Iran.
His trip to the region came as Cuba’s government announced that its soldiers killed four people aboard a speedboat registered in Florida whose occupants it said opened fire on officers in Cuban waters.
“Suffice it to say, it is highly unusual to see shootouts in open sea like that. It’s not something that happens every day. It’s something, frankly, that hasn’t happened with Cuba in a very long time,” Rubio told reporters. He said that the U.S. is gathering its own information and that "we’ll be prepared to respond accordingly.”
